From the Cary Institute of Ecosystem Studies where if you can get past the headline, this is notable: “We found that global climate models omit factors critical to understanding forest response, such as hydrology, soil conditions, and plant-animal interactions.” Point though: one experimental tree forest does not a GCM factor make.
Maple syrup, moose, and the local impacts of climate change
Understanding warming requires long term studies that account for real-life complexity
Millbrook, N.Y. — In the northern hardwood forest, climate change is poised to reduce the viability of the maple syrup industry, spread wildlife diseases and tree pests, and change timber resources. And, according to a new BioScience paper just released by twenty-one scientists, without long-term studies at the local scale—we will be ill-prepared to predict and manage these effects.
Following an exhaustive review of more than fifty years of long term data on environmental conditions at the Hubbard Brook Experimental Forest, located in the White Mountains of New Hampshire, the paper’s authors arrived at a sobering conclusion: current climate change models don’t account for real life surprises that take place in forests.
Lead author Dr. Peter Groffman, a microbial ecologist at the Cary Institute of Ecosystem Studies, comments, “Climate change plays out on a stage that is influenced by land-use patterns and ecosystem dynamics. We found that global climate models omit factors critical to understanding forest response, such as hydrology, soil conditions, and plant-animal interactions.”
One thing is clear: at Hubbard Brook Forest spring is advancing and fall is retreating. Over the past half century, the climate has warmed and there has been a rise in rainfall and a decrease in snowfall. Winters are getting shorter and milder, with snowpack melting some two weeks earlier. But soil thaw is no longer tightly coupled with spring plant growth, creating a transitional period that results in the loss of important soil nutrients.
In the absence of insulating snow pack, exposed soils are more susceptible to freezing, which damages tree roots. Sugar maples are suffering a one-two punch: soil frost is linked to tree mortality and warmer winters reduce sap yield. Mild winters are also encouraging the spread of pests and pathogens, including the destructive hemlock woolly adelgid—which was once held in check by cold winter temperatures.
As snow depth decreases, deer are better able to forage in the forest. Their browsing damages young trees and spreads a parasite that is lethal to moose. Reduced snow pack is also a challenge for logging operations, which use snow-packed roads to move trees, and ski resorts, which already rely heavily on manmade snow.
Groffman concludes, “Managing the forests of the future will require moving beyond climate models based on temperature and precipitation, and embracing coordinated long-term studies that account for real-world complexities.” Adding, “These studies can be scaled up, to give a more accurate big picture of climate change challenges—while also providing more realistic approaches for tackling problems at the regional scale.”
Paper Title: Long-Term Integrated Studies Show Complex and Surprising Effects of Climate Change in the Northern Hardwood Forest
Authors: Peter M. Groffman, Lindsey E. Rustad, Pamela H. Templer, John L. Campbell, Lynn M. Christenson, Nina K. Lany, Anne M. Socci, Matthew A. Vadeboncoeur, Paul G. Schaberg, Geoffrey F. Wilson, Charles T. Driscoll, Timothy J. Fahey, Melany C. Fisk, Christine L. Goodale, Mark B. Green, Steven P. Hamburg, Chris E. Johnson, Myron J. Mitchell, Jennifer L. Morse, Linda H. Pardo, and Nicholas L. Rodenhouse
Bioscience paper: http://www.aibs.org/bioscience-press-releases/121116_indirect_effects_of_climate_change_could_alter_landscapes.html.
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In the absence of a viable economy there will be tribes of climate studiers and health care cost shifters with more studies.
george e. smith says:
November 21, 2012 at 4:54 am
Heresy! My wife and I have brought real maple syrup to restaurants that don’t have it an suggested to B&B’s and restaurants that they could charge a little extra for maple syrup.
I agree with MJB, in Maine snowy winters lead to high white tailed deer mortality whereas moose are not effected and overwinter well.
People who live in tropics more likely to die seven years earlier
=========
People in the tropics are living longer than they did 50 years ago before the warming. If warming was bad, they should be living shorter than they did 50 years ago.
People in cold climates tend to live longer than people in warm climates because cold long ago killed off the grasshoppers that fiddled all day and left only the hard working ants. In the tropics the grasshoppers still fiddle all day and die from poverty.
Gary says:
November 21, 2012 at 5:51 am
The point is that adequate forest management requires knowledge of the system dynamics that research sites like Hubbard Brook provide.
The trouble is that their conclusions about what is happening, and more importantly, what will happen in the future are all GCM-based. If only they would just stick to the actual science!
Presumably this would be beneficial for the other, larger segments of New England’s agricultural economy. But why aren’t there studies of those larger segments, instead of ones relentlessly accentuating the negative? Because that’s what funding agencies like to hear? And that’s the fashionable finding to make a career?
(I’m not saying there’s anything wrong with this study. I like its sophistication and carefulness, and wish other studies had those characteristics.)
I’d like to add a bit of Yankee lore, concerning Sugar Maples. While lore can’t count as “objective science,” it can’t be totally discounted.
The English branch of my family goes back to the Mayflower, (along with 15 million or so other Americans, who sprang from around hundred Pilgrims,) and also I live in the same general area they lived, nearly 400 years ago. Also I come from a line of men who had children later in life than my eldest son, (who was a father at eighteen.) For example, my great-great grandfather, born in 1797, fathered my great-grandfather in 1850, and he fathered my grandfather in 1888. For this reason I’ve heard tales “handed down” that might be forgotten in other families.
I’ve heard Sugar Maples did not grow in the south of New England when the Pilgrims arrived. The local Indians did not have a word for “sugar,” (or “salt,”) and were scornful of the English for being addicted to sugar. The English were trying to get these Indians interested in sugar, because they had a lot of sugar cane growing down in Jamaica, and wanted to trade.
To the north and west Sugar Maples did grow, and in those places Indians harvested Maple Syrup in large amounts. Those Indians did have a word for “sugar,” though they also were not very interested in cane sugar, preferring Maple Sugar.
(The fact the English could not sell the sugar resulted in them turning the sugar into rum, which did sell.)
The reason Sugar Maples didn’t grow down on the coastal plain was likely an after-effect of the MWP. Sugar Maples can be hurt by January thaws. The sap starts to rise too early, and when bitter cold returns the freezing sap expands and ruptures the bark. This makes tasty icicles, but wounds the tree. Too many wounds and the tree is susceptible to fugal invasions, sickens, and dies. It is for this reason that, though Sugar Maples grow all the way down to the mountains of Georgia, they won’t grow where winters are too warm.
Because the Pilgrims arrived during the Little Ice Age, they were able to plant Sugar Maples in Southern New England and have them do well, and to harvest sugar. Likely they hastened an expansion which would have occurred naturally. However even in the time Henry Thoreau wrote (1840’s-1860’s) it was unusual to find a “wild” Sugar Maple in Massachusetts woods, which is why he is surprised and mentions finding one in “Weston Woods.” (As those woods are up on a highland west of Boston, there is a chance that particular “wild” Sugar Maple didn’t blow as a winged seed from a plantation of trees, but was from a local group that survived the warmth of the MWP.)
In any case, because I know this lore I tend to be less alarmed than my friends, when Sugar Maples die in the Boston Area, and I’m less likely to blame CO2 and SUV’s.
It’s been much warmer in the past. Here’s an interesting old (2006) article about the
“Hypsithermal,” roughly 4000 years ago: http://pielkeclimatesci.wordpress.com/2006/07/12/open-arctic-ocean-commentary-by-harvey-nichols-professor-of-biology/
Gary says:
November 21, 2012 at 5:51 am
The Hubbard Brook ecosystem is one of the most measured anywhere in the world.
========
The Uncertainty Principle ensures that the more you measure a system, the more it will change as a result of the measurements, obscuring any change that would have occurred in the absence of measurement.
in measuring the Hubbard Brook ecosystem, researchers have changed the Hubbard Brook ecosystem. How can anyone be sure that any change they are measuring is not anthropogenic, caused by the presence of the researchers themselves. Or is the lesson of frog death to be forgotten so soon?
A “sticky wicket” indeed. I am most surprised to see this expression from the sport of cricket used by someone from North America; but then in the scripts of the “Bilko” show Phil Silvers would give himself a line like: “Well Doberman, you’ve blotted your copybook!”, and when told that his audience wouldn’t get it he’d say “Ah, but they’ll understand it in England”. Are you a bit of an Anglophile Anthony?
In sure these guys are already all over it.
http://www.northamericanmaple.org/
Even a funding link. Let private enterprise spend there own money, no one has more self interest
In preserving these resources. Same said for most other funding we taxpayers dole out for.
Ah yes, here it is :
“Millions of trees were brought down by the weight of ice around the affected areas.[9] As many trees were damaged or fell by the heavy ice, the maple syrup and orchard regions suffered heavy blows and massive losses in the storm; Quebec’s maple sugar industry, the largest in the world, was devastated.”
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/North_American_ice_storm_of_1998#Impact
Louis Hooffstetter says:
November 21, 2012 at 5:53 am
They explore ‘Carbon and Communties, Acid Rain, Mercury, and Nitrogen Pollution’.
===========
Nitrogen pollution? Surprised Al Gore isn’t out there campaigning for a cap and trade on Nitrogen. The EPA should be setting limits on the amount of Nitrogen Pollution allowed in the environment.
There should be strict limits on the amount of Nitrogen emitted by power plants and automobiles. Nitrogen emissions need to be lowered substantially from the 79% of all air-borne emissions to much less than 1%. Nitrogen pollution is responsible for untold deaths each year in the US alone.
I grew up in maple syrup country in Eastern Canada. At various times we heard about the death of the industry due to weather conditions, while much of it was economic. Going to a syrup bush, the situation was obvious: the trees were dying of old age and there were no new trees growing, as there was neither the excess cash flow nor the interest in maintaining the family business considering the reward/work ratio. But the weather was always a concern, with newspapers reporting on a good harvest or a bad one in progress. Maple syrup harvesting is a risky endeavour and requires a certain level, speed and duration to have happended.
The story, as written, has only value if you believe that a human-caused, permanent/very long timeframe warming is going on. Like so many of these type of stories, they are grounded in a “growing” understanding of how temperature and precipitation affects the biosphere. In former days, the study would merely describe the effects these variables would have. Now they are structured to show the effect “man-made” climate change is having.
If you are a researcher, you structure what you do around how the community sees value in your work. Pure research had a place. Now, with “policy relevant” directions, that same research is coded as “climate change stud\y”. In a few years the study will be about the potential negative impact of longer, colder winters and springs on the maply syrup industry. Perhaps at some time it will be on how changing conditions impact the industry. I look forward to that generalized time.
@ur momisugly Gary – The Hubbard Brook ecosystem is one of the most measured anywhere in the world….. Bashing a report because the dreaded word “models” appears in it is lame. C’mon fellow-skeptics, get a grip.
Very well said. I work in forestry and the wealth of information, particularly the long-term data, generated by the Hubbard Brook study has been invaluable. If their data indicates a local warming trend, or decreasing snow cover, I would tend to believe it. The cause of these changes, relation to past changes, etc. are still fair questions of course.
While the techical conclusions of this paper are probably correct (changes to soil structure, herbivore feeding habits, etc), the conclusion that this will “reduce the viability of the maple syrup industry” is untrue. At most, it will simply make it unviable in its current geographic location. Until man started building farms and roads and making assumptions that Nature was somehow static, forests migrated. Areas that had been pine forest were gradually converted to hardwood. And other factors over time would take down the hardwood stands are restart the cycle.
Even if every hypothesis in this paper is true, the maple sugar industry will survive – just in a different location.
10000 years ago the Florida maple syrup industry was devastated by global warming. Sadly, they didn’t have Al, Lisa, Mann and the IPCC to save them.
How dumb do they think we are? (Probably shouldn’t ask that) Trees grow where the environment suits them. I was being a bit flippant, but I’m pretty sure the trees in the northeast weren’t there 20,000 years ago when that 2 mile thick ice sheet was there.
Treelines move with the climate, that’s a fact of nature. When the next ice age starts, treelines will move south again as saplings find better conditions there and there isn’t a thing we can do about it.
MJB says: November 21, 2012 at 7:45 am
If their data indicates a local warming trend, or decreasing snow cover, I would tend to believe it.
—–
You can plot a trend in all data, even white noise or red noise like the stock market. It doesn’t predict the future though.
Ferd, measuring at the quantum level is one thing, at the ecosystem level is quite another. Measuring stream nutrients at the bottom of the watershed hardly will affect nutrient deposition and recycling on the upper slopes, for example. Hubbard Brook is carefully controlled to minimize the effects of measurements and other human intervention precisely to discover and quantify natural conditions. Some manipulations are conducted to see the effects they produce, but overall the goal is to disturb as little as possible. Check out the website at: http://www.hubbardbrook.org/
From my counter-USGCRP document:
Regional Climate Impacts: Northeast
172
The 2009 USGCRP report states that warming will adversely affect
the maple syrup industry in the Northeast. In fact, the future may
be even better for this sweet treat.
Maple syrup is a sweetener made from the sap of sugar maple or black
maple trees. In cold climates, trees store starch in their stems and roots
before the winter, which is then converted to sugar, rising as sap in the spring,
when the trees are tapped.
Vermont is the biggest U.S. producer, with nearly a million gallons of syrup produced annually,
and Maine produces about a third of that amount. While U.S. production of maple
syrup is significant, Canada produces 80% of the world’s total, mainly in Quebec.
Production occurs from February through April, depending on local weather conditions.
Freezing nights and warm days are needed to induce sap flows. The change in temperature
from below to above freezing causes water uptake from the soil, and also creates
a stem pressure, that, along with gravity, causes sap to flow out of tapholes or other
wounds in the stem or branches.
Sap flow is therefore dependent upon weather conditions, and predicted changes in
local and regional climate can be linked to the production of maple syrup, and according
to the USGCRP, climate change will surely be bad for syrup production in the Northeast.
Perhaps they cried wolf too soon. Christopher Skinner and two Cornell University colleagues
found that the scientific literature was quite conflicted about the future state of
maple syrup production, so they developed a computer model to relate high-resolution
daily high and low temperatures and maple syrup.5
They concluded that
The major finding is that sap collectors will need to get busy earlier in the
late winter and spring to adapt to the expected warming winters in the New
England states. Through the twenty-first century, the optimal time to maximize
sapflow days will advance to an earlier date in the year. By 2100 this change will
be nearly 30 days.
Further,
Provided the change in the beginning of the sapflow window can be anticipated,
the number of sapflow days will change very little through 2100 in the heart
of the Northeast U.S. maple syrup production region. In fact, across Maine,
the simulations show an increase in the number of sapflow days provided the
8-week window is moved to early February.
They concluded that a minor change in the schedule of sugaring operations will maintain
current production levels throughout this century.
Has anyone here bought maple syrup in the last couple decades? Inflation has driven them to cut back on the boiling down process. The stuff they’ve been pushing is more like tincture of maple sap than maple syrup.
Who cares! Maple syrup is so expensive now that we can’t buy any. And besides, they have to burn so much propane to boil the water off that this industry should be considered a threat to the earth.
/sarc
AGW people have been claiming that sap flow will decrease and/or the sugar content would drop. I’ve been taping maple trees since the late 1970’s. I have actually seen an increase in production in the past few years. In addition, the sugar content has been above 2% and sometimes is high as 3%. Two years ago I produced probably the most and highest quality of maple syrup since I first tried my hand at it over 30 years ago.
The single biggest factor for sap flow is to get warm days and cold nights in late winter/early spring. Last year wasn’t very good because the winter was mild and there wasn’t that daily warm/cold fluctuation. However two years ago it was excellent. Every day fluctuated from warm to cold and we got a bumper crop.
“””””…..Ric Werme says:
November 21, 2012 at 6:33 am
george e. smith says:
November 21, 2012 at 4:54 am
Well I would be more worried about the effect on the trees, of the barbaric mutilation of them,for their sap.
And all quite unnecessary. The midwest plains States can make all the high fructose corn syrup needed for everybody’s pancakes till the end of time; and a whole lot cheaper too.
Heresy! My wife and I have brought real maple syrup to restaurants that don’t have it an suggested to B&B’s and restaurants that they could charge a little extra for maple syrup…..”””””
Well I’m a lifelong Infidel, and near as I can discern, the only thing wrong with corn syrup, is it doesn’t come from Vermont.
Starbucks brag that they don’t use corn syrup in their “organic foods” (means contains carbon).
But you can find every plastic sugar substitute known to man at any Starbucks.
People don’t buy buggy whips much anymore either. Who was the last famous person to die from corn syrup poisoning ?
And then there are the other man made threats to the World supply of maple syrup : http://www.reuters.com/…/us-syrup-robbery-idUSBRE87U0Z220120831
Ray says:
November 21, 2012 at 11:53 am
There are also oil fired boilers and wood fired boilers that are often fired with scrap maple from cleaning up the sugar bush. And systems that use steam to preheat the fresh sap coming in.
One thing that I haven’t seen but makes a lot of sense is to use reverse osmosis to get a lot of water out of the sap. Don’t know of any solar maple sugaring pans though. 🙂